“Butch, down,” Tank commands, and the dog ignores him in favour of rutting up against my leg. “Stupid fuckin’ mutt.”

I pat his giant skull and sook him up some more, just the way Tank hates. “On your mat!” Tank bellows, and the dog whines and wanders over to the mat by the door.

“You’re so mean.”

“You baby him. He’s already a big enough sook as it is.” He opens the fridge and peers inside. “I’m gonna have to buy one of those fighting pit bulls to show him how a real guard dog behaves.”

“You’re so full of it,” I say, leaning against the bench. “I see right through you, you know. I’m not buying any of it.”

“Eat me,” Tank says, slamming the fridge door closed. I’m guessing he was looking for a beer, and the fact that I’m here means he can’t have one. He stalks over to the lounge and flops down on it, kicking his feet up on the coffee table and turning on a game.

I sigh and head to the bathroom. For a long time I stare at myself in the mirror, thinking about all of the things his mother said to me, and then I remove the tablets I stole from my bra. It would be so easy to just toss them back and let them take me away, but that’s the point, isn’t it? That life is hard, and it’s fucked, and unfair. But it’s the same for everyone. We all experience different things, we’re all faced with different obstacles—it’s the way we confront our fears that matter. It’s the decisions I make from here that matter.

With a final glance, I close my fist around the pills, and walk down the hall into the lounge room. I take a deep breath and then I stand in front of him.

“Unless you plan to remove your pants and let me stare at that beautiful cunt of yours, I suggest you move, darlin’,” Tank says. I hesitate and hold out my hand to him, the three tiny pills—somewhat deteriorated and a little bit sweaty—on show in the centre of my palm. “What the fuck is that?”

I swallow hard. “I stole them … from your mother’s house.”

“Come the fuck again?” He sits up, ramrod straight.

“I thought I needed them … to forget.”

“Jesus Christ, Ivy,” Tank mutters. He looks away, shakes his head in disbelief. “And why the fuck are you showing me now?”

“Because I’m done.”

He shoots up from the couch, towering over me as he grabs my shoulder with his vice grip. “What do you mean you’re fuckin’ done? I haven’t wasted all this time trying to straighten your bitch arse out just to have you—”

“Tank!” I say, so frustrated I could punch him in the face. He’s so fucking bull-headed. “Will you shut up? Please?”

“Don’t you tell me to shut up, bitch. I put myself on the fuckin’ line for you with my Prez, and if you think I’m going to let—”

I don’t punch him in the face, but I do the next best thing. I swing my arm back and hurl the pills at him. “God, you’re such an arsehole. Don’t you think that if I wanted to take them I would have in the bathroom just now?”

“Why the fuck didn’t you? Huh?”

“Because, you jackarse, I didn’t want to. I took the pills from your mother, and she was the first person besides you who’s ever been nice to me. I can’t take them. I don’t want to take them.” Tank arches a brow and I clarify, “I want to take them. Right now I’m considering getting down on my hands and knees and tearing your lounge room apart until I find them, but I can’t take them because it means stealing from her and disappointing you. And for some unexplained reason, I don’t want that.”

“What are you saying?” Tank glares down at me. His eyes are hard and unyielding, and I can’t say I blame him after all the times I’ve put him through shit like this.

“I’m saying you don’t have to fight for me any longer, because I’m … I’m fighting for myself.”

“Well good. ’Bout fuckin’ time,” he says, and the momentary glimpse of happiness and pride I saw in his face disappears as quickly as it came. Tank looks away and I press a hand to the centre of his solid chest. He glances down at me. Our eyes meet, and I feel his heart beneath my palm, steady and strong, so much like the man who owns it.

He’s everything I need, and nothing I want. He’s good for me, but I’m not good for him. I should cut my losses.

I should do a lot of things that I don’t.

I slide my hand up his chest, over the coarse hair of his beard, and I tilt his chin down to me as I stand on tippy-toes and lean in. Tank’s eyes search mine. His lips are so close, and I can taste the coffee on his breath. I inch forward until our lips are touching, but too quickly he pulls back.

“You sure you want this? ’Cause I gotta tell ya, babe, I wanna fuck you so bad my balls are blue. You got no idea how much I want to touch you, but I don’t want a pity fuck, and I don’t want you to fuck me out of obligation.”

I sigh and shove him hard in the chest. It completely catches him off-guard and he loses his balance, falling back onto the couch with a grunt. I climb onto his lap and wrap my arms around his thick shoulders. “I’m lonely. I’m tired of making bad decisions, and this may be just another one, but it doesn’t feel like it. I don’t have anything to give you but me, Jonah, so if that’s not enough—”

“Did that coke kill your brain cells, babe?” he asks, grinning from ear to ear. “It’s enough; trust me, it’s fuckin’ more than enough. All I’ve ever wanted was you.”

I won’t make promises I can’t keep, and I won’t lie about going into this without reservations, so I don’t say anything more. Instead, I press my lips to his and I feel him open to me. His tongue pushes into my mouth, hungry and seeking, probing. I grasp the sides of his face and kiss him like I’m starving, like a want to devour him the way his hands and lips and tongue are consuming me.

Tank grabs my hips and rocks me back and forth in his lap. His cock is long and hard against his leathers, and just the feel of it pushing up against me has my pussy begging for more as we move with one another.

I unfasten his zip and slide my hand inside his pants, stroking the velvet length. I want badly to feel that curved cock hitting all of the right spots inside me, his wide head stretching me open as I come. I want him to bruise, to hurt, and to punish. I want him to fuck me so hard that I feel that soreness and think of him every time I move for the next two days. And as though he can sense all this, as though he knows how badly I need it, he pulls away and says, “Get on the coffee table. On all fours.”

I clamber to my feet and unfasten my jeans, sliding them down my hips and stepping out of them in a hurry. “Shirt too. I wanna see those fuckin’ awesome tits.”

I remove my shirt and bra, tossing them behind me. I stand completely naked before him while he’s still partially clothed, his dick jutting out proudly as he strokes it. He tilts his chin at me. “The table, babe.”

I eagerly scramble onto it, silently begging him to shove inside me, but he lowers himself to the floor and I feel his warm breath on my pussy.

“Fuck me, Tank,” I plead. Just moments ago his eyes had promised me everything I wanted, but this was not it. Where is the hard pounding? The pain? The release?

“Shut the fuck up,” he growls, and his tongue darts out to taste me. I flinch and move my hips away from him.

I can do pressure on my clit; I can handle anything any man has ever tried to give me, but the one thing I can’t do, the one thing that destroys me is pleasure without pain. I know it’s fucked up. I know I sound like I belong in some skeezy BDSM novel, but it is what it is. I’ve never let any man touch me without begging them to make it hurt. I need it to hurt.

Tank knows that. He’s always known that. I’ve never been able to separate pure pleasure from that part of me that needs to be hurt. So the fact that Tank is trying again to break me of that, well, it not only pisses me off, but it feels like a knife to the gut.